The role of expectations and attributions in the alleviation of learned helplessness.

The purpose of the investigation was to determine whether altering attributions for failure would enable learned helpless children to deal more effectively with failure in an experimental problem-solving situation. Twelve children with extreme reactions to failure were identified and were given intensive, relatively long-term experience with one of two training procedures. It was hypothesized that a procedure which taught the helpless children to take responsibility for failure and to attribute it to lack of effort would result in unimpaired performance following failure in the criterion situation, but that a procedure which provided success experiences only (as in many programmed learning and behavior modification programs) would lead to changes of a lesser magnitude. The results revealed that following training, the subjects in the Success Only Treatment continued to evidence a severe deterioration in performance after failure, while subjects in the Attribution Retraining Treatment maintained or improved their performance. In addition, the subjects in the latter condition showed an increase in the degree to which they emphasized insufficient motivation versus ability as a determinant of failure. The present study of the alleviation of learned helplessness in children has grown out of several relatively independent lines of investigation: contingency learning in experimental animal psychology, attribution theory in personality-s ocial psychology, and cognitive therapy in clinical psychology. The phenomenon of learned helplessness, conceptually related to the earlier notion of